“I laugh too even though I wonder if we all know it isn’t funny, and if so, why it is that we’re laughing still?”

“In hindsight, I see the event as strange, a random act of violence from which no lesson can be drawn.”

I’m interested in the way in which memory—the way that we think about the past—is a re-creation of the past, how the past keeps happening.

“Memories that I had buried with graduate work were now being triggered by my return. A pit grew in my stomach over the next month, prohibiting me from enjoying the most basic things…”

You’ve never been a woman. You’ve been inside a woman, but you’ve never been a woman with something inside of her. You are inside of me. You marvel at the shape of my bladder.

Some of the best novelists in the Americas and Europe have written about chess—yet one of the best chess novels, Chess Story (published in German as Schachnovelle; also known as The Royal Game) by Stefan Zweig, was written by an otherwise less than superlative author.